Feature

The recent financial crisis has posed key challenges for policy makers. The conference on ‘Fiscal and Monetary Policy in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis’ that took place in Paris on 8th and 9th of December 2011 aimed at bringing together prominent researchers and academics to discuss these challenges and to present frontier research. It was organised by the Banque de France, the Paris School of Economics, the Euro Area Business Cycle Network (EABCN) and the Economic Journal. The articles presented in this volume focus on issues related to sovereign debt and fiscal policy. Following the outbreak of the crisis, the budget deficits of emerging markets and especially advanced economies have risen to historically high levels, under the effects of automatic stabilisers and countercyclical policies. According to the IMF World Economic Outlook statistics, the cumulated deficits of advanced countries rose from 1.1% of GDP in 2007 to 6.5% in 2011 (for emerging market and developing economies the rise was smaller but still sizable, from a surplus of 1.3% to a deficit of 1.1%). Correspondingly, gross government debt levels have increased by 30 percentage points of GDP in advanced economies between these two dates, reaching 103% of GDP in the United States, 230% in Japan, 83% in the United Kingdom and 88% in the euro area. At the same time, financial markets have become reluctant to buy government debt, particularly in European states from the so‐called periphery, where interest rate spreads to German government bonds have risen sharply (by over 3,000 basis points in Greece, 1,400 in Portugal, 500 in Ireland and about 400 in Spain and Italy, for 10‐year bonds). This has led fiscal authorities to undertake fiscal consolidation programmes to regain full market access and contain government spreads. These noticeable developments have reopened some long standing issues in fiscal policy, making this feature a timely publication. This feature consists of the following six articles

Debt · Deficit spending · Economic policy · Economics · Emerging markets · Financial crisis · Financial market · Financial system · Fiscal policy · Government bond · Government Debt · Interest rate · Macroeconomics · Monetary economics · Finance · Global Financial Crisis and Policies · State Capitalism and Financial Governance